The Field of Advertising

The field of advertising has a long history, and it is a field that is indispensable in our modern society because it helps inform the public of the basic goods and services that are available in the marketplace. Advertising can be defined as any form of paid communication with the purpose of motivating a reader or viewer to purchase a product or service, to influence public opinion, to win political support, to sell an idea or a cause, or to act or think and perhaps influence others in the manner desired by the client. The main goal of advertising is to motivate or persuade people to buy a particular product or service, and among the media used to accomplish this are radio, television, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, billboards, posters, catalogs, and brochures. Advertisers and all who work in the agency are in the business of selling (Pattis 1). Accomplishing this task requires the ability to communicate, but this communication often takes the form of manipulation of images and of language. After a discussion of some of the ways in which advertisers accomplish this task, an examination of several print ads for women's tennis shoes will serve to illustrate how advertises manipulate the structure and form of language to affect the consumer.

Alan C. Harris notes that advertisers have a rhetorical purpose defined as the presentation and exhibition of a product or service and the exhortation and coercion of potential buyers:

Moreover, advertisers want potential purc

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things." This statement requires explanation, leading to a conclusion that relates the message to the product: You are emotional about the way you work out. You are emotional about what you work out in. And you are even more emotional if you have to wear really ugly shoes. Consider these two ads in terms of the foregrounding noted by Harris. The first ad features the term "top-rated" in a way that links this to "walking" while downgrading "standing still." There is both a literal meaning and an emotive meaning here--not only the non-Avia shoe is standing still, but so is the purchaser who buys a different brand. As will be seen below, moving and activity are motivators for purchasers of tennis shoes and is emphasized in many ads. The second ad is more problematic, which is one reason its message is weaker. The ad emphasizes the word "emotional," using it four times. This seems a peculiar emotion to link with tennis shoes, but various aspects of emotion are linked by advertisers with women's tennis shoes, showing that the advertisers believe this to be a motivating factor. Larry Percy defines syntax as the composition or grammatical arrangement of words. He cites research to the effect that inference, or the generat

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